Katy: Rice, Rails & the MKT

The town of Katy takes its name and its shape from the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad — the 'MKT,' universally shortened to 'the Katy.' Before the rails came, this stretch of coastal prairie was known as Cane Island, a stagecoach stop where Karankawa people had hunted buffalo into the 1820s and where Santa Anna's army marched toward San Jacinto in 1836. When the Katy Line reached the site in 1895, developers platted a town, the post office opened in 1896, and the very next year a settler named William Eule grew a rice crop that launched the region's defining industry. For most of the next century, rice and rails ran Katy: irrigation wells fed the paddies, and towering concrete rice dryers stored the harvest beside the tracks. This driving tour spans Katy across the Fort Bend, Harris, and Waller county lines it straddles, connecting the founding marker, the churches of the young town, and the heritage sites that preserve its rice-and-rail past.